Business reports pull together information from a variety of sources. Some of these sources are people who themselves are part of a chain of persons assembling and analyzing data. For example, an income statement (a typical summary report for a company) may provide just a few dozen data values. These values, however, may be the result of summarizing, through both manual and automated methods, more than 100,000 finer-grained data values.
A report creator has the task of gathering as well as organizing the data for a report. The gathering often requires acquiring data not just from computer software systems (e.g., accounting systems) but also from persons who themselves have gathered data from computer software systems and from other persons. Traditionally, this data collection process is carried out as follows: a person (the “data requester”) sends an email containing the request to one or more people (“data providers”) who may be able to satisfy the request. Sometimes the email includes an attached spreadsheet. The data provider downloads the spreadsheet, enters in the requested information, re-attaches the edited version of spreadsheet to a responsive email, and sends the responsive email to the requester.